Facebook Launches Facebook Music Feature as Part of News Feed

Facebook launched their new Facebook Music feature today as Mark Zuckerberg spoke at the f8 conference in San Francisco. Facebook Music includes streaming services like Spotify, Rdio, MOG, Rhapsody.

The new Facebook Ticker feature (a.k.a. Facebook timeline) shows updates about songs your friends are listening to. Buzzy phrases have been wrapped around this: "real-time group listening" and "real-time serendipity" are a few. Details on how it works were incredibly vague, suggesting that the earlier idea that a Facebook Music Player had been scaled back might be true.

The original Facebook Music idea seemed to be about a Facebook Music Player that worked like Turntable.FM, where there was a "listening room" kind of feel, where there was a simultaneous broadcast. It seems now that the Facebook Music experience will provide a link-based experience via the Facebook news feed, so that users can listen to a song at the same time, but not synchronized. They can still chat in real time, share a great music experience, but it seems that the all-in-one dashboard device that was being called a "Facebook Music Player" has been back-pedaled to something smaller.

Spotify clearly is the preferred music partner here, with CEO Daniel Ek participating in the F8 Keynote as well as the "Future of Digital Music" panel later in the day.

This is part of a larger initiative: movies and news publishers are partnering as well. The master plan is to be a social hub for music, movies and news via Facebook apps that are part of the Facebook social graph. The current vibe around the new Facebook changes might be making people complain, but maybe that's just because changes are hard for some users that have grown accustomed to the current Facebook experience.